Hillary Clinton and the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

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Young people, many of whom have no memory of Hillary Clinton as First Lady, have voted for Bernie Sanders by almost comically wide margins. They favor him 54 percent to 37 percent in a USA Today poll taken in March. In the Iowa caucus, Sanders beat Clinton by a nearly 6-to-1 margin—84 to 14 percent—among voters under 30. Clinton won voters 65 and older by similarly impressive numbers, 69 percent to 26 percent.

Is it really the case, as some have implied, that young people prefer a 74-year-old democratic socialist to Clinton because they’re the most sexist generation?

It’s not that Hillary Clinton is, as she said recently, “not a natural politician.” It’s not that she’s a powerful and self-assured woman. Sexism surely explains some of the hostility toward her, but it doesn’t begin to account for the fact that Clinton is among the most disliked and distrusted candidates in modern American politics.

For insight, perhaps we could turn to a younger Hillary Clinton—the one who said, during her graduation speech to Wellesley’s Class of 1969, “We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest.”

The one who said, in the same speech: “There are some things we feel—feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.”

The one who concluded that speech with these lines from a poem: “And you and I must be free/Not to save the world in a glorious crusade/Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain/But to practice with all the skill of our being/The art of making possible.”

It isn’t quite fair to compare the Hillary Clinton of her early 20s to the Clinton of nearly 70. But nearly half a century on from her Wellesley speech, Clinton is in a position of leadership and power—precisely the target of her criticism and constructive protest. That young valedictorian would understand why her current self is now so distrusted by young people.

She and her classmates were part of a generation that demanded and created change. “We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible,” as she said then.

Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade—years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program—so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap, and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap.

By many accounts, Clinton has been an effective and often under-the-radar advocate for women over the past half century. Her legacy is, naturally, complicatedandfraught, but she seems to have genuinely aimed to use her power to change realities.

But there is also this. The gap between expectations and realities can be narrowed by changing realities—or by lowering expectations. In their youth, Clinton and her generation of idealists and protestors believed and worked for the first kind of change. They’ve spent much of the subsequent half century working for the second. In the 1960s, they rewrote the script that they had inherited. In the 1980s and 1990s, when they became the powers that be, they rewrote it again.

Today, the latter script says that we face dire challenges across a range of sectors—climate change, the corruption of our politics by private money and special interests, gun violence, racial injustice, our deteriorating infrastructure, health care costs, income inequality and more. Yet the best we can hope for, those adhering to that script argue, is maintaining the status quo or, in the best case scenario, incremental reform.

Whatever her early ambitions about “practic[ing] with all the skill of our being the art of making possible,” for much of her career Clinton has worked from a script whose central theme is, as George W. Bush once put it, the soft bigotry of low expectations. Its plot is determined by the path of least resistance.

It would have taken courage for Clinton to vote against the Iraq War in 2002; or to “evolve” on same-sex marriage before her party did; or, as a senator from New York, to oppose the bankruptcy bill of 2001, which favored banks and the credit card industries; or for to her lead the fight for a $15 minimum wage rather than supporting a $12 federal standard. But political courage has never been the Clinton brand, of course.

Taking the path of least resistance isn’t a crime. No one expects more from Clinton than the caution and incrementalism that she promises. And it’s certainly true that if she wins the nomination and the election, she will be a better president than most of the alternatives.

And yet there is a vacuum in our politics waiting to be filled. There is a longing to rip up the script we’ve been using for so long, the one that everyone—Republicans and Democrats alike—knows isn’t relevant and isn’t serving us.

Consider the breathtaking audacity of what Republicans have put on the table, and the level of frustration and anger their choices reveal. One of the frontrunners, Ted Cruz, a man famously repellant to and held in contempt by nearly all of his Senate colleagues; the other, Donald Drumpf, a man willing to defy many of the cherished principles of the party’s platform, from his Iraq War critique to his call for closing the trade borders, while openly insulting nearly every voting bloc the party needs to win. Those Republican voters have gone off script.

So, too, have many young people voting for Sanders. The off-script Clinton of 1969—the one who aspired to a more ecstatic and penetrating mode of living, and who said that “fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it. Not now”—would understand. “We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands,” as Clinton put it then, “and attempting to create within that uncertainty.”

What we might create from the uncertainty of 2016 is still unknown. For the first time since the 1960s, truly profound progressive changes seem possible—in the realms of racial justice, environmental justice, economic justice and more. Clinton comes off as inauthentic—not because she's too ambitious, as the criticism often goes, but because she isn’t ambitious enough. She doesn’t appear true to her own values or equal to a moment that begs for something more, begs for someone who will expect more from herself, and from us.

Last fall, a friend and I were talking, and one of us asked the other who the Republicans would nominate. We made halfhearted cases for each of the candidates. Finally, once none of them seemed like remotely plausible presidential material, my friend said with a smirk of resignation, “Why don’t they give it to Clinton now and get it over with?”

For me, that smirk of resignation summed up just about everything there is to say, good or ill, about Hillary Clinton. Her candidacy has seemed fated all along. It’s easy to imagine a much, much worse president—and a much, much better one. She would no doubt be perfectly competent at coordinating and presiding over the same old song and dance of the last few decades. She wouldn’t exactly stand in the way of progress, but probably wouldn’t help advance it much, either.

And her election wouldn’t be a tragedy. It would just be the last, saddest chapter in the Class of 1969’s renunciation of its youthful ambitions, and the final leg of its long, half-century march toward diminished hope and lowered expectations. Young people have lived with the burden of that soft bigotry for most, if not all, of their lives. Is it any surprise that they now seem ready to try their hands at “the art of making possible”?

A condensed version of this op-ed appeared in the June 2016 issue of In These Times. Purchase it here.

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Theo Anderson is an In These Times contributing writer. He has a Ph.D. in modern U.S. history from Yale and writes on the intellectual and religious history of conservatism and progressivism in the United States. Follow him on Twitter @Theoanderson7.

I wish I could believe this articles's final assessment to be true. I fear that any election that does not fully return the Democrat's former New Deal policies and more to address our litany of problems ASAP would be a tragedy of the first order. It would be the missed opportunity we will not have again in time to make an impact. Time is not on our side as climate change and the buildup of military activity continue at an increasing rate. We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them off. Once the TPP and TTIP are locked down the erosion of our sovereignty with the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) tribunals will be assured. As more voters desperate for change see for themselves the suppression and fraud blatantly practiced in the 2016 Democrat primaries and caucuses, the revulsion will make it hard if not impossible to unite the Party. The policy of incrementalism that is advocated by Hillary does not recognize the urgency to change course. It is that same incrementalism that has slowly altered or removed New Deal policies and shifted the Democratic Party into Republican Light.

Posted by joyce_hale on 2016-05-09 15:52:46

Hillary Clinton has become the enemy of her younger self.

The incremental change the present system is capable of is insufficient to keep up with our rapidly changing world. Its increasingly rigid understanding and responses have become delusional, and more so with every passing day.

Posted by greg on 2016-04-24 03:31:06

A very poignant, yet lucid, reflection of the times and my generation by a very articulate and insightful writer of the Millennial Generation. It is a well-earned indictment of those Boomers who have come to marginalize the revolution by accepting creeping incrementalism as the solution to our problems.

For those of us in my generation still committed instead to a healthy revolutionary approach to solving our problems, it should come as no surprise why we, along with our children, are so passionate about Senator Sanders and so disappointed with Hillary...

Posted by Don Gordon on 2016-04-23 16:02:47

Some if us oppose Hillary because (a) she is too militaristic (remember the Iraq War?) and (b) both Clintons are crooks. The whole two party system sucks. Any questions?

Posted by MFox on 2016-04-23 12:47:06

"where she shines is when you get her talking about policy"?

Policy is a nice way of saying BOMBING VILLAGES IN THE THIRD WORLD

Also, as far as young women haven't fully experienced sexism - are you nuts?

Are you familiar with how many young women experience domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment and discrimination?

That's an asinine statement and amazingly patronizing

Posted by gregoryabutler on 2016-04-23 12:11:48

I do think that young women, particularly, do not understand the sexism that pervades society because they haven't yet fully experienced it yet, and that this explains much of the gap in her support from older women vs. younger women. Hillary is not a natural campaigner, she hates doing it, Bernie is much better at it. So was Bill (though lately he's been awful). Where she shines is when you get her talking about policy. There really is no question that sexism is at least a FACTOR in her weaker support with younger people and especially white men.

Posted by loganbacon on 2016-04-23 11:14:06

Well written and thoughtful evocation of where Hillary is coming from . . . until you make an unexplained leap in logic.

What makes you assume she lowered her expectations? Isn't the explanation that she judged what steps were possible to take, and took those steps, just as well able to account for her actions? To "practice with all the skill of [one's] being the art of making possible," isn't it necessary to always make fine judgments about what CAN be made possible? You're not making anything possible when you fail.

Was the Beijing speech a product of a low expectation? Or did it change the world?

I think it's possible to take more now than it was in 1995. The Republicans were all but an unassailable monolith marching in lockstep in the '90s. Now they are far, far from that. I think Hillary is the right person to judge what steps can be taken now, and then to take them.

Posted by Trickster on 2016-04-20 23:28:03

Fantastic article, thank you

Posted by Ken Smythe on 2016-04-20 21:13:32

Very well written!

Posted by Chisti Ma on 2016-04-20 12:08:51

Clinton is clueless and always has been about the struggle that wage owners go through to survive.The economy is powered 2/3rds by consumer spending.With prices so high and wages so low most households don't have that much cash to spend to keep the economy going.If Clinton gets in she will continue the policies that led to economic inequality producing a situation like 1929 or 2007 when the level of production driven by speculation cannot be keep going because people can't buy.

Posted by DavidD on 2016-04-19 13:19:34

"There is a secret to being a supporter of Bernie Sanders. It is something that totally escapes the thinking of most Democrats and Republicans. It is the mental understanding that Sanders is fighting a war that most people are not. It is the war between billionaire/corporations and the people. Unless you are fighting this war as well, you cannot possibly understand how important it is to vote for Bernie over Hillary. This is not about Hillary or Bernie, it is about fighting your real enemies, the multi-national corporations/billionaire puppetmasters who are trying to control this nation and the world. You ignore this war at your own peril." - Randolph Greer